I consume pop culture for a living. I gobble up YA books, movies, and TV shows like a little Ms. Pac-Man, and I’ve recently noticed something about a lot of our most popular heroines:

They act a lot like dudes.

The recent demand for stronger female characters has been translated in Hollywood and elsewhere maybe a little too literally, like, “You want stronger female characters? How about a 90-lb straight white girl who’s a stoic prizefighter struggling with nymphomania? Also she has a robot arm.”

I’m not saying there’s no girl out there who wouldn’t want to bare-knuckle brawl a dude like "Divergent"’s Tris, or take out a room of henchmen like Hit Girl, but sometimes it seems like the only way to be a mainstream heroine is to embody values culturally coded as masculine. Aggression! Dominance! Guns! Suck it up! Fight fight fight!!!

These kinds of heroines teach girls that it’s cool to be nothing like a girl.

So here, I’ve made the creators of the world a cheat sheet: 10 feminine strengths a heroine could embody. Do all women share all of these traditionally feminine traits? No. Do many men exhibit them all the time? Yes. Do we often see them celebrated in pop culture? NOPE.

10. Super Listening

Women are trained from an early age to nurture, and part of that is active listening. I remember a lunch in high school where a girl I didn’t really know sat down next to me and my best friend and started ranting apropos of nothing about people who protest outside of Planned Parenthood. After three minutes of almost incoherent vitriol, my friend qently asked her, “When did you have your abortion?”

Out came a quiet, anguished monologue from this 16-year-old about the abortion she’d just had. My friend listened respectfully until she got all the hurt out. She needed to tell that story to someone, anyone, that day, and my friend was there to listen. Fuck shooting spaceships out of the sky, this is the kind of thing that actually saves lives.

9. Emotional Laser Focus

There isn’t a woman alive who hasn’t gotten shit for being emotional. Emotions are irrational. Stop being so hysterical.

Let me posit two things: first, that our emotions are largely the product of our rational understanding. Second, that the whole value of being alive is the ability to experience emotion. To the extent that you feel emotion, you are alive. The stoic action hero throwing out a terse one-liner as he kicks his nemesis off a skyscraper may live to the end of the movie, but he is dead inside. He’s so emotionally blocked off he wouldn’t know happiness if it pissed in his ear. Facing a world that you know will hurt you with an open heart, experiencing all your joy, all your sadness and all your fear, is the hardest, bravest, most heroic way there is to live.

8. Uncanny Foresight

A month after your neighbors moved in, you correctly predicted their divorce. You never jog under that one bridge though you don’t exactly know why. You’ve got Uncanny Foresight, aka “Women’s Intuition.”

We usually see Uncanny Foresight onscreen right before a female character becomes a victim: she feels like someone is in her apartment, but she still tip-toes around crying, “Who’s there?!” until they pounce from the shadows. Now if only she was encouraged to take her instincts seriously, maybe she would pounce first.

7. Boundless Fortitude

Watch your female relatives this Thanksgiving, cooking all morning and then cleaning up all afternoon while the guys watch the game. Watch your pregnant cousin feed her toddler, whip up a casserole, and care for her 8-year-old with the fever and runny nose.

Testosterone is good for blasts of productive aggression, and that bears ye fruit in battle. But in the day to day, women have been getting the hard shit done for centuries. Don’t act like you don’t know at least one woman who puts in 40 hours a week at work then goes home to cook her family dinner.

6. Superhuman Ability to Deny Pain

No, I’m not going to pull out the old chestnut about women’s pain thresholds being higher because they have to give birth. Regardless of how pain thresholds compare between the sexes, the majority of women expect and endure pain a hell of a lot more often than the majority of men. Because birth, yes, and periods and pregnancy. And also because high heels, hot combs, underwires, Brazilians, bleach jobs, relaxer, hair threading, waxing, and Botox.

Because a guy can bellow out a gut-scream while doing reps at the gym but a lady doesn’t even want you to know she’s sweating. Hiding your struggle is very feminine.

5. Self-Transformation

There is a heroine who embodies transformation: Cinderella. Unfortunately, she set the precedent that your transformation should come from someone else, be that a fairy godmother or Cinna from the Capital. The heroine passively, naively benefits from their makeover, because God forbid she WANT to look fabulous. Leave that to Cruella De Vil!

To live in a world that makes it crystal clear just how wrong you look, and stand before a mirror every day to make an objective inventory of your surface -- to, beyond that, dare to make yourself stand out -- and then go out the door with your head held high to take on the world... well, that’s not a life for the meek. Transforming yourself through clothes and make up can be like a superpower for women -- whether they are cisgender or trans -- and some very cool dudes.

4. Perception

Perception is valued in all human beings, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a masculine/feminine distinction in how it’s best acquired. To make a quick comparison, think of the feminine-coded Miss Marple (written by Agatha Christie) vs. the super-masculine Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle). Sherlock cannot maintain relationships with people and approaches gruesome murders like so many Rubik's cubes. Marple draws on her own relationships and experiences to make complex insights into human nature.

3. Summoning Forces

They organize the car pools to the protest. They show up at the wake with the casseroles. They pass around the hat when the uninsured co-worker is in the hospital. You’re already picturing some group of middle-aged women you know, aren’t you?

They’re the unsung civilian militia that will mobilize if any threat touches their kids or their community, based in a church or workplace or PTA, and they are usually middle-aged to older women.

It is evidently masculine to imagine yourself in a pyramid: One atop a rigid hierarchy keeping heaven above and hell below. It is therefore feminine to see society as a team, a herd that circles protectively around the weak and the young once dark falls.

In films and TV, a group of determined, efficient middle-aged women is…well, damn. Can’t think of anything I’ve actually seen that in.

2. Invisibility

This is the counter to Self-Transformation.

In every woman’s life, there’s a time when she will need to disappear. Maybe it’s just for one night, when she has to walk somewhere she doesn’t want to go. She’ll put on a boxy jacket and hide her long hair. She’ll walk the way she never would in daylight down the street, with big sprawling steps. Or maybe parts of her will disappear. Her legs under baggy pants, her boobs under sweatshirts. Maybe she’ll just stop speaking up in class.

Maybe she’ll end her Facebook or leave Twitter. Maybe she’ll drop out of school, or leave work, or stop showing up at parties, for reasons that are always unclear.

It is a feminine defense mechanism, to know how to make yourself disappear.

1. Kindness

If women have one edge culturally, it’s that they are allowed, nay, expected to be kind. As a woman, you’re actually encouraged to think good thoughts of others, to hold hands with your friends and hug your loved ones every time you meet. It has to extend your life to have those small freedoms. I wish I could give them to every hardened dude I’ve ever seen, on and offscreen. Only maybe then the conflicts in the movies would get resolved too fast.

]]>http://www.xojane.com/relationships/ode-to-the-bitch-boss-what-entertainment-tonight-taught-mehttp://www.xojane.com/relationships/ode-to-the-bitch-boss-what-entertainment-tonight-taught-meMon, 27 Oct 2014 17:00:00 GMTHere in the real world, the Bitch Boss is the best, most necessary thing that can happen to you.

She’ll steal a good man and a great idea in "Working Girl." She’s the Crystal Connors to your Nomi Malone. She’s the Bitch Boss, the anti-maternal, unfeeling superior who leers down from the top of the corporate ladder at the naive ingenue just trying to get started in sitcoms.

Here in the real world, the Bitch Boss is the best, most necessary thing that can happen to you. Especially if you are some ass-first ingenue.

At 21, fresh out of college and making a cool seven dollars an hour, I learned the most important lessons of my professional life as a production assistant at the feet of the top-ranking segment producer at Entertainment Tonight. And I mean literally at her feet: I sat on the floor next to her chair, clutching a legal pad, as she and four other producers dished A-list gossip that would never make it to air and finessed the stories that would.

When the grown-ups were done talking she’d double check I’d kept track of what footage she needed and then it was time for me to hustle my ass to the tape dungeon, or the camera guys, or the satellite feed, or d) all of the above and fight the other P.A.s to score the tapes first.

The Key to the Kingdom of Celebrity gossip and lots and lots of VHS and Betamax tapes

To her, I was one in a faceless stream of tape jockeys who she’d chosen to work directly under her over the years. To the other P.A.s, she was the scariest person in the office, the hardest to please and the last person you wanted to fuck up in front of. To me, she was a wrathful goddess, and I worshipped her.

Here’s what she taught me:

5. No Matter How Successful You Get, You Better Work Your Ass Off

While I was feeling sorry for myself for getting to work at 5 a.m., she was waking up at 3 to get there at 4:30. She would habitually work through lunch, eating a sandwich at an editing bay while polishing her segments. If news of a celebrity break-up or wedding or death broke, she’d stay through the night, crashing on a couch if need be. She’d been a top-ranking staffer for years but she acted like she had to prove herself for the first time with every segment she aired. Which is exactly why she’d been on top so long.

4. Gold Stars Are For Third Graders

In highly competitive industries, the prize you get for being good at what you do is that you get to keep doing it. Period. I quickly learned that if I found some tape that everyone was looking for and offered it up into her waiting hands, well that meant I got to keep looking for her tapes. Whereas if I slipped up, you can trust she’d let me and anyone who was standing within ten feet of us know.

She was never abusive like some of her lower-ranking colleagues (a friend of mine was actually pelted with VHS cases by an enraged editor) but I learned early not to expect cheerleaders or hand-holding and that the appropriate response to success or failure is renewed effort. For that I really can’t thank her enough.

3. Her Approval Is Worth Winning

Here’s the wonderful thing about a harsh, hard-to-please boss: when you actually do please her, that sense of accomplishment feels like a ride down a water slide running with wine cooler. You are going to be 1000 times more fulfilled working for her than a dude who is paternalistically, condescendingly kind to you while cracking down on/promoting your male colleagues.

And not to be too hetero-normative about it, but the approval of one die-hard Bitch Boss is worth approximately one million bajillion smiley creepers who think you’re soooo talented and ask you to a “script meeting” that turns into a nightmare dinner date with them pushing you to head back to their place for a cocaine brainstorm.

2. Don’t Look for a Career, Look for a Vocation

My beloved producer no doubt brought home a paycheck with a number on it most of us would associate with lottery winnings, but she never struck me as a materialistic person. She wasn’t sending out for boutique sushi or picking her way across the newsroom in $5,000 heels. I never heard her talking about an upcoming vacation or the next level parties she had the option of attending -- all she talked about was the show. She knew more details about the last 25 years of "Entertainment Tonight" than IMDB ever will.

She genuinely loved her work. While I eventually figured out celebrity news was not my beat, I never stopped envying her pure, Joan of Arc-like fervor in approaching her workday. I coveted her sense of purpose until I found it for myself, and that idealism kept me off career paths that almost-but-not-quite fit, until I co-created a pilot and found the job where the harder I worked the happier I was.

1. A Bitch Boss Will Pave the Way to Your Best Boss

And no, I don’t mean she’ll pass along your resume or promote you out of nowhere. Don’t hold your breath for that shit, she’s got her own life to live. What a Bitch Boss WILL do is make you the kind of efficient, uncompromising worker that totally blows away the awesome, supportive mentor boss you meet later down the line, who will do those things for you.

The standards she instilled in you, of working hard and making the tough phone calls and putting out fires and getting specific about the details: this is exactly the training you need to do the best work you possibly can when you find the project that means everything to you. She trains you to be your own Bitch Boss. And that’s the version of yourself you want to work for.

]]>http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/it-happened-to-me-i-started-doing-stand-up-and-got-a-joke-stolenhttp://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/it-happened-to-me-i-started-doing-stand-up-and-got-a-joke-stolenThu, 15 Aug 2013 18:00:00 GMTHave you ever said something in a group of guy friends and immediately after one of them says the exact same thing like he’s translating you into guy?

When it’s done right, stand-up comedy is heroic and transcendent, the rawest form of comedy. However, as I learned when I started going to open mics in Los Angeles at age 19, the vast majority of aspiring stand-up comedians don’t radiate transcendent insight so much as they radiate sinister implications of faulty, unstable inner-workings.

Blame the accessibility of the form (all you need is clear space and some chairs) for attracting the broken and deflated like the Island of the Lost Balloons, but my first forays into LA’s stand up scene to watch my then-boyfriend perform made me desperate to elbow my way onstage and say something -- anything –- designed to crack a smile. To banish, for just a few minutes, the collective tirade against dumb girlfriends, pushy moms, and bitches who give head wrong.

Why, I asked myself, was everyone up there so male? And why were they so angry? So I started putting my name on the list.

Obviously there are also hilarious, eloquent guy comedians; they just get quickly Swiffer-Swept by Fate into better venues and HBO Specials. The guys stuck at open mics years on end are not the ones who click with a mass audience, so they get left behind to antagonize the young blood. There’s a simple Darwinian elegance to the system: Your first audiences are usually your worst audiences, rooms of other angry stand-ups, waiting for their turn. Make that room laugh and you’re funny.

For two years I haunted sticky coffee rooms and shady bars late at night, listening to hours of amateur comedy and building my set. I’d get up for three minutes, then stay through the other comics’ sets, then hop in a car with my stand-up friend to cross town and do it all over again, tweaking my performance each time, 2-3 times a night, 3-4 nights a week.

The hook was the feeling onstage. When I stood smiling up into a spotlight, I lived in a luxurious bubble of eerily confident calm. I found mental sunshine in the darkest hours of the drunkiest dives, but the clarity ended the second I stepped offstage, with a hurricane of adrenaline that made me shake.

Years after things ended with the then-boyfriend, I was walking around town practicing material into a flip-phone held up to my ear, thinking no one could tell I was talking to myself: We do crazy things when we’re in love.

Clarity AND a fake neck tattoo. What more could you ask for?

In another year, I climbed from coffee shop open-mics to rooms run by choosier dudes, to “bringer shows” at the Comedy Store’s Belly Room (you get on the list with a recommendation and, more importantly, the promise to bring a set number of friends who will buy a set number of drinks) to finally (yay!) Friday night shows at the Belly Room. You didn’t have to bring friends, just your A-game.

It was maybe my fifth time in that room that a joke of mine preceded me onstage. I had been pacing, whispering my set like a nun in a horror movie whispers a rosary, when the guy who had gone ahead of me a few weeks prior cashed in my closing punch line.

My joke was that based on the Terrorist warning level for the day, I’d carpe diem and be a little more romantically adventurous. Red level warning? I might just hit on a cute guy in an elevator. His joke was that he’d hit on a cute girl in an elevator and if she didn’t respond well, he’d remind her of the terrorist level warning for the day.

Humor (like every art) is a dialogue. Phrases, cadence, concepts get borrowed. But this didn’t feel like homage, it felt like he’d Hamburgled my brain. I knew what I had to do.

I barreled onstage, up-ending tables and innocent tourists from Kentucky in my haste, wrapped the mic cord around his neck and bellowed: “THE NEXT TIME I HEAR MY WORDS COME OUT YOUR MOUTH I WILL WEAR YOU ON MY FIST LIKE A VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY.”

Ha ha! Just kidding. I did nothing that triumphant/unbalanced. I was weirdly flattered, for a split second (“My material just got ganked! Je suis arrivé!”) And then the onslaught of raw panic: I had to adjust for the hole in my act before the obligatory “high energy” jock jam started and I was called onstage. The audience couldn’t hear that same joke twice, regardless of who wrote it.

So I pulled from my B-string and made a different joke. I never told that original joke again. I patched the hole with stronger material. Who knows if he even realized what he’d done. Maybe he thought he’d changed it enough to make it his own. I don’t know: I never confronted him.

In another couple years, I went from doing stand-up to writing and performing sketch comedy. When I wrote sketches for myself and a guy friend to do onstage, the other comics would walk up to him afterward and compliment what they assumed was his writing. Even after he corrected them and said “Thanks, but my partner wrote that scene…” they would glance at me and keep talking to him.

Maybe the guy who stole my joke just disassociated me with writing he liked, as they apparently did. That’s his problem. That’s their problem. I’m still writing. I’m still making

jokes. It’s what I do now (albeit by typing, sun streaming in the window) for a living. Some guy out there might be reading or hearing them and re-telling them as his own, at work or to friends or who knows, recycling them at an open mic. Let him. I’ve got plenty more where they came from.

Have you ever had a joke poached? Have you ever said something in a group of guy friends and immediately after one of them says the exact same thing like he’s translating you into guy? Do you love/hate/perform stand up?